Asking Some Hard Questions  

The following discussion, taped in the spring of 1988, was held between Menachem Brinker, an Israeli writer and activist in the peace camp, and Dissent editors Mitchell Cohen and Irving Howe. Dissent: Twenty-one years after the 1967 war and the …





Dependent Individualism  

The decline of the Republican right and the renewed interest in major social legislation compels us to ask a crucial question: Can the welfare state fulfill its promise without a strong ethical core? In Western Europe that ethical core was …



Canon Bashing  

This academic year, the New York Times Magazine observed the end of spring term with an article (“The Battle of the Books,” June 5) on the current anticanonical fashion in teaching literature. The Magazine has taken a noticeable interest in …



The Mitterrand Transition  

The French Fifth Republic is thirty years old. Its founder and first president, Charles de Gaulle, designed its constitution to achieve two overriding goals: to secure political stability by concentrating power in the hands of a strong presidency, and to …







To the Other Shore  

We are pleased to print below two excerpts from a journal that Daniel Bell wrote after his trip to the Soviet Union last spring. The first excerpt describes a lecture he gave at the Leningrad State University.—Eds. In the afternoon, …



The Mind of a Historian  

Here is a rich book—a dozen essays, of uneven quality, some hitherto unpublished, some published in inaccessible places, which, taken together, offer a conspectus of Herbert Gutman’s energetic genius. Yet the volume would seem shapeless and sprawling—now labor struggles in …



About the Election  

I’m not quite as sanguine as some Dissent editors about Dukakis but when you look at the other candidate, Bush caving in to the troglodyte right and its Quayle, there isn’t any choice but Dukakis. He isn’t going to set …



The Sound of One Hand Clapping  

I first made contact with the women’s liberation movement twenty years ago, in the fall of 1968, when Linda Gordon showed me a copy of a magazine called No More Fun and Games, put out by an organization called Cell …



About the Election  

Michael Dukakis has been a liberal, a champion of fiscal responsibility and in his latest phase an enthusiastic practitioner of industrial policy, translated into cooperation between state government and corporate enterprise on terms exceedingly generous to the latter. His running …



Media Clippings  

It never fails. The man who survives the nutty primary system and wins the Democratic nomination is hailed for a while as a media genius—and his staff is full of geniuses, too. It happened to McGovern, Carter, and Mondale—and now …





Prescription for the Democrats  

In Ronald Reagan’s America, Bob Kuttner has emerged as the Great Refuter. In The Life of the Party, Kuttner bemoans the paucity of Reagan Age journalists attempting to “influence the mainstream debate from the left.” Kuttner is the preeminent exception …